Alex Reid

On Tuesday night (Jan 24th, 2012), the City of Vancouver added a dataset of Street Trees to the City’s Open Data catalogue. The dataset includes a full address listing of all boulevard trees on the streets of Vancouver, along with species type and other characteristics.

The next afternoon, this food social group got on the case and created a map of public fruit trees on city boulevards in the city. The group next wants to find out where the public fruit trees in public parks are.

The young Toronto franchise chain of poutine cuisine late night diners is coming to Winnipeg in May 2011, replacing the resting place of the Glass Onion.

See the masticators blog where Allan Lorde called it last month.

New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been pushing for more public information to be handed over to geeks to achieve three goals; more civic transparency, offering more services for less money and promoting the city as the next tech mecca.

For the second year in a row, the City of New York has embarked on a call to arms to geeks with its own annual data competition, releasing over 350 public data sets and asking tech companies to make apps that are not only useful but may be the basis of the next Google or Facebook.

This year’s $10,000 grand prize went to Roadify, an app that sends alerts to mobile phones about subway, bus, and driving conditions, allowing users to add comments and real-time updates as they commute.

It isn’t just about the money though, it’s about the pride and attention. Some of the competition judges included Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai.

Some of the finalists included DontEat.at, an app that sends a text message when you check in to a restaurant that has a risk of being closed for health code violations; Sportaneous, a geo-map app that helps users find and join pick-up games close to them with other users that match their skill level; and Parking Finder, an app that locates nearby parking garages and their parking rates.

As I get older, looking after myself has become more of priority; especially watching my weight. I began putting on weight after I took on a stressful job ten years ago and my weight has slowly gotten out of hand.

I’m not fat obese, but I’m certainly not as trim as I’d like to be.

An application that has proved very useful to me is Lose It! which is available both as a web site application and an iPhone application. It’s probably my most used iPhone app, after my communication tools.

You enter in everything you eat and it calculates your fat, carbs, protein and more (if you want) daily and weekly, sending you email reports every weekend. It also displays a variety of reports on the macronutrients you consume and the exercise done to burn off excess calories.

In the last few months, I’ve learned what I consume too much of and what I consume not enough of. As well, it puts emphasis on exercise. In short, it’s made me more aware of what goes in and what I burn off.

You can set goals for yourself, much like Wii Fit, and you can add your friends ala social networking, so that you and your friends can encourage each other.

At the time that I write this post, Lose It! now has 1 million users and handles thousands of users at any given time. Lose It! was the top free iPhone Health and Fitness application in both 2009 and 2010.

Whether you have an iPhone or an iPad or not, I highly suggest using their web site.

The British Columbian town that recently was named the “best surf town” in North America is proposing a ban on fast food restaurants.

Right now there are no fast food restaurants and Tofino town councillor Stephen Ashton wants to keep it that way.

We are very unique where you can come to this place and you don’t have a Starbucks, Tim Hortons or a McDonalds,” said Ashton.

While Ashton acknowledges that such a bylaw may conflict with provincial or federal laws, Tofino wouldn’t be the first to ban fast food restaurants. In 2008, Los Angeles city council voted 12-0 to place an one-year moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles, to combat obesity (where 30% of adults are obese).

Under California law, fast food restaurants are defined as establishments which have a limited menu, sell items prepared in advance or heated quickly, have no table service and serve food in disposable packaging.