Anyone who has spent more than a couple of years paying attention to people getting mega rich on the internet, has fostered at least a small desire to start an internet company.

Matt Rogers of new startup Aroxo began a series of posts about starting such a company over at Read/WriteWeb early last month. The first in the series, How To Bootstrap Your Startup, is an excellent article about starting your company on a smaller-than-perfect budget.

The second post, coming nearly a month later was posted on Thursday of last week and entitled How To Create a Web app.

Both of these articles are great, but I hope we get to see more like the first sometime soon. While it is geared towards internet startups, I'm pretty sure his guidance would scale well if you were looking at starting something in the offline world as well. Either way, the series is worth reading, and RWW is worth subscribing to.

Saskboy has gone through the trouble to plan another Saskatoon meet for SaskBloggers this Saturday October 13th, and the turnout is looking pretty good so far.

This year's Regina meet was a big success, so let's hope Saskatoon can match it, or at least come close. It'll be interesting to finally put faces to some of the other bloggers in the flatlands.

To RSVP, you can visit SaskBlogs.ca, Abandoned Stuff or check out the Facebook event listing. Hope to see you there.

Although the Riders have had a pretty tough go for the last five weeks (1 win, 4 losses for those of us keeping track), I’m still holding onto my optimism for the remainder of the season. If we can win again this afternoon, it should restore some more of the confidence that was lost during our four game losing streak.

I just can’t understand what caused a team to win five in a row, then lose four in a row directly after. Gah. It’s frustrating. Actually, it's beyond frustrating. After nine weeks we had the best Rider start since 1970 (when we started 10 - 2, and ended up 11 - 4), but something horrible happened at the Banjo Bowl, and we just haven't recovered--despite our win last week.

But, whatever, I’m sure that, like the rest of you, a home playoff game would be next-to-perfect. So let’s hope for a couple more wins coming up here, then for the home playoff game, then root for the Grey Cup.

It's actually not "new" anymore, as I've had it for going on two weeks now. A couple of months ago, a friend of mine dropped my trusty HP PhotoSmart M425 on the ground while the lens was out and rendered it inoperable. When my brother came to visit from Montreal a couple of days after my birthday, he brought me a new Canon PowerShot S3 IS and a photo printer for a birthday gift. Cool.

I haven't had much time to play around with it aside from taking pictures of friends, but I do plan on testing out all of its advanced features sometime in the near future -- mainly when I have batteries that will last more than a couple of hours of shooting with it. However, from what I can tell so far, it's an awesome camera. And I can modify the shit out of it with new lenses and the like. Again, cool.

Maybe I'll turn into an amateur-wannabe-professional photographer and turn this spot into a horrible photoblog. Cool? Probably not, but who knows?

I hadn't heard about the television documentary event of a lifetime until, until this little piece by Jason Kottke came through Google Reader. And wow, am I ever happy that it did.

To say that Ken Burns' The War is epic is to not do it justice. At fifteen hours long, it is by far the longest piece of film I've ever watched (or in this case, begun to watch), but every minute is worth watching. I just wish there was some more Canadian content--the two minutes or so that I've seen dedicated to us seems, well, blah. I know it's supposed to be from an American perspective, but still, throw us a bone.

I'm currently through four parts of a total seven, and can't wait to finish it. It is at times funny and warming, but at other times horrifying and disturbing. I'd say you need to watch it any way you can. Some would agree, while some would disagree. Do as you wish.

It's been exactly one year since I put the current design of this blog live. I was going through old entries in my RSS feed, and was interested in remember exactly what it looked like previous. I doubt any of you will remember it, but now that I look back, I'm not entirely sure why I switched.

This design has served me well for the couple of hundred posts that have passed through it, but I'm still not happy with it. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no ideas for ways to improve upon what I've got, so for the time being I'm stuck with it. Sometime in the future, I do plan on redesigning however.

What do you think? Is the current design better than the old one? Should I just switch back? Should I redesign from scratch? Simply modify this one a bit? Or just keep with the status quo?

When people first started using the term Web 2.0 in 2005, I was tolerant, and even used the term myself quite a bit. Then it become some sort of massive worldwide buzzword of utter annoyance. I cringe nearly every time it comes up, and think it's about time we put the stupid marketing term away and leave it there.

An even more disturbing phenomenon in internet circles is starting. Jason Calacanis has taken it upon himself to give the internet the official definition of Web 3.0. Ugh. First of all, Mr. Calacanis is in no position to be offering an official definition for it, as it has yet to manifest itself. I've tackled this in a couple of comments over at Wu Wei:

Note: These comments are slightly edited for context. Head over to Wu Wei to get the whole discussion.

Calacanis didn’t coin 3.0. Don’t give him too much credit, as the term has been floating around since, pretty much, the beginning of the Web 2.0 buzz-phenomenon. And, his representation of his view as the “official” definition is laughable.

These pseudo-intellectuals currently running the webosphere are much too self-involved to have any relevancy to the average person.

By Calacanis and crew arbitrarily assigning definitions to terms as of yet unheard of, they are doing a massive injustice to the progression of the internet… even though they think they’re doing the complete opposite.

I don’t think he is in a position to “officially” define something that grows organically. It has to happen before it can be defined.
The programmable, semantic and accessible web is just a natural progression from the current state of the web, and pretty much seems like the inevitable future of it. The need to buzzify it seems more like a ploy for headlines and blog posts by self-indulgent internet “masters” than anything else, and is simply not needed.

The term itself is just horrible. It might seem nostalgic, if the Web 2.0 phenomenon was more than barely two years old. A lot of people are espousing negative views of the term, and even poking people in the eye for using it, so I'm not alone here. Tim O'Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0 even thinks Web 3.0 is ridiculous. It is. Stop saying it. If you haven't started, don't—you'll sound like an idiot.

On Wednesday night, Premier Lorne Calvert announced that Saskatchewanians will be heading to the polls on November 7, 2007. I guess he's had enough of being Premier.

I just don't see any possible way for the NDP to remain in power in this province. They've been in power for 27 of the last 36 years, and wholly the last 16. I'm pretty much sick of them, and I'm sure most of the province is as well.

I won't say who I'm voting for, but it's not going to be NDP, and it won't be the Liberals, even though they do have a shiny new website.

On October 23, 2005 I (re)launched my blog in this space. It's been a pretty interesting twenty four months since then, and it only looks like it will get more interesting in the coming twenty four months. Last year on this date, I marked the occasion with a bit of statistical gazing, but I don't think I will do the same this time around. Instead, I'll just do this:

Thanks to all of you that managed to keep coming around here, even though I went through a few spots where I rarely, if at all (June and July of this year, for example) posted anything. Even more thanks to those of you who comment from time to time, and even sometimes link to me. Cool.

Anyway, here's to another year... let's hope the next is better. I've got lots planned.

Microsoft paid a very large amount for a very small piece of Facebook yesterday... $240 million for 1.6% to be exact, and with that comes a valuation of $15 billion, making it the 5th largest internet company in the US. Apparently Google was in the bidding but missed out. That's gotta chap them a little, as now Microsoft is pretty much guaranteed to own the ad space on Facebook for the foreseeable future.