Month: December 2003

And finally, the last part of my contribution to Carnival of the Canucks. Hope all these links give you lots of reading and entertainment over the holidays!

Damn, that Matt Goyer is one righteous dude. He interviewed at both Amazon and Microsoft and got job offers from both! Even better, he took notes!

(He took the offer from Microsoft. Congrats, Matt!)

Speaking of righteous dudes, here’s Gideon Strauss, whose blogger convivium I attended last Saturday (and forgot about the time, which means I’ve have to catch up with Sean and Keitha at Ashley’s and Chris’ wedding in Canmore). I’ve mentioned before about how he likes to ask The Big Questions, one of which is “Why do you get up in the morning?”.

Ghost of a Flea points out…egad…another William Shatner album?!

Anne Galloway of Purse Lip Square Jaw writes about machines never forgetting.

And finally: Shame on the Liberal Party for trying to shut down a blog that makes fun of Federal Liberal Party Leader and Not-So-Honourable Prime Minister Paul Martin.

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I’d like to thank David Janes for inviting me to write this installment of Carnival of the Canucks. It was an honour and a privilege!

Be on the lookout for next week’s edition, hosted by Jim “Blogs Canada/Officially Unofficial” Elve!

Her name is Raymi, and yes, she is a minx. Not safe for work, because she has a predilection for posting pictures of herself, many of which are saucy shots of her in various states of undress. Strangely enough, I discovered her blog by way of L.A. blogger Tony Pierce. The current page (there don’t seem to be any permalinks) has a photo — and I remind you, not safe for work — that I’m certain Ray and Roast Beef from Achewood would appreciate.

What would Brian Boitano blog? My best guess is that if Brian Boitano had a blog, it would be rather like 2xy.org, better known as The Goluboy Chronicles. “Fresh and frooty” in every sense of the phrase, Goluboy (Russian slang for “gay”) is as visually mish-mashed as Times Square, Picadilly Circus or Shibuya, but just as info-dense. In addition to daily entries, there are also a good number of music and movie reviews that I often go by.

Mention The Hebrew Hammer, and suddenly, he’s everywhere! While at a Christmas party for Tucows’ Marketing, Product Management and Research and Innovation (The! Best! Department! Ever!) departments, I made mention of The Hebrew Hammer to Greg Frank, who was looking for some Chanukah viewing for a quiet December 25th. I also mentioned it to The Redhead, who’d never heard of it, either. But Marc “Weissblogg” Weisblott, who rants so well, has, and uses it as a launching point for ranting about “Jewsploitation” — the Jewish version of Blaxploitation, as in Shaft Super Fly et al.. There are no permalinks on his blog, but this rant is the top story as I write this. Just read the whole page; he’s a mensch, and it’s all good.

(A little note: if they ever invent “Flipsploitation”, I’m hoping for a role similar to Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch. When we played “Starsky and Hutch” as kids, I was the only one who wanted to be Huggy — he was cooler than Starsky and Hutch combined.)

“A” from The Meatriarchy seems to be a bit down on Accordion City: he says that this description of Portland, Oregon reminds him of our fair city. I get the feeling that what would make A happy might make me miserable, and since I’m the damn mayor of Accordion City, I shall invoke my powers and say “Hey buddy, there’s the door…”

I’ve never had a client tell me “You are very rude…I hope you burn in Hell”, but Eva has. Eva has great stories from the world of customer support.

Where would we be without hastily scribbled notes on serviettes? First of all, a “serviette” is Brit/Canuck English for what others may call a “napkin”. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, you may not realize the number of ideas that were born on a serviette — the Laffer curve (a cornerstone of conservative economics), the lyrics for several pop and rock songs and the El Torrito spec, which made CD-ROMs that PCs could boot from, to name a few. Now Michael O’Connor Clarke, in his blog, Uninstalled (formerly I Love Me, Vol. I) shows us serviettes that make the whole planning process easier.

Roland Tanglao: Tech news maven, Blogware reseller, all-round cool guy. I finally got a chance to meet him at BloggerCon!

A media whore like me never forgets his first interview, and mine was with David Akin. It was over cans of Guiness in our hotel room at the Luxor Hotel in Vegas, where he was interviewed me about a VB-based video slurping-and-stremaing project that I worked on with Chris Cummer. He suggested we make up hacker names for the interview (this was for an article on the DefCon conference), and I went by “Rice Cube”. Heh.

David has an interesting report on the popularity of Apple in Tokyo and one on how it’s harder to get a job at an Apple Store than it is to get into Stanford. He also a posting about how Canadians would rather pay for WiFi by the hour than by the day, according to a study by Decima Research. My fellow Canadians, that is just crazy talk.

Speaking of WiFi and blogging, be sure to check out WIFLblog!

Whether or not you agree with the war effort, you’ve got to say that this guy’s generosity is nothing short of amazing. A filet mignon on a flaming sword to you, sir, and to The Blog Quebecois for pointing it out!

Breakfast never looked so pretty! Aaron Straup Cope’s This is Aaronland features a gorgeous photo illustrating what he learned about breakfast from the Italians.

If you are a lover of pop and rock, add Overheard at the Bar to your daily reading right now!

If the relationship between culture and technology, especially internet technology, is of interest to you, Paul Kelly’s As We Know It should be part of your daily reading.

And last, but not least for this entry, let me tell you about Accordion City’s supreme photoblogger, Rannie “PhotoJunkie” Turingan and his incredibly cool Advent calendar. I was supposed to submit something, but things have been a little bit crazy at work lately. Perhaps next year?

Next: the last installment of my contribution to Carnival of the Canucks!

I need to run away from the computers for a bit, but there are a few more links left, which will be covered in the remaining two (Bob and Doug Mackenzie managed to enumerate only 8 of the 12 days of Christmas) entries. Stay tuned!

For you non-Canuckleheads, a “two-four” is the Canadian colloquial term for a case of beer, which holds 24 bottles.

One thing that bothered me as a teenager growing up in the 1980s was what Douglas “Generation X” Coupland later called “legislated nostalgia”. Simply put, it’s being made to feel nostalgic for someone else’s past, and in the eighties, we were having the sixties marketed very strongly to us. The Boomers derided us as the “nowhere generation”, while at the same time, many of them froze themselves in time, maintained a permanent semi-adolescent state and soaked up any opportunity that the “Thirteenth Gen” could’ve used. They ended up raising self-indulgent children with poor impulse control, a few of whom I had the misfortune of dating.

(Speaking of children with poor impulse control, have you seen these dolls that Blork Blog points out?)

(By the way, “south-east Asian”, a.k.a. “oriental”, and “hippie” are almost contradictions in terms, which is one argument for multiculturalism — we’re pretty much Grateful Dead-proof and perhaps your last, best hope against the patchouli-reeking rabble.)

Anyhow, for those of you, who like me chanted “Bring me the head of Jerry Garcia!”, who preferred DM to CSNY, there’s Boomer Deathwatch, a site devoted to the watching boomers bite it. Schadenfreude at its finest.

Boomer Deathwatch is run by Rick McGinnis and Kathy Shaidle (yup, Ms. Relapsed Catholic herself), both of whom I met at David Janes’ warblogger/conservative blogger party in the spring.

Speaking of David Janes, check out his home office. That’s a pretty sweet collection of gear. Maybe we should have some kind of local blogger post-fest where people blog photos of their computer desks.

(By the way, David helped launch The Carnival of the Canucks.)

I’m a slow but passable reader of French, but Karl’s blog helps keep me sharp, and his blogging, like mine, is a mish-mash of geek and life. This week, he attempted animal haiku and talked about how XFN is a big, steaming pile of merde.

Richard, the “gwai lo” in Just a Gwai Lo (that’s “white guy” in Cantonese) asks if low-carb means low-taste. Nope: it’s low-fat that means low-taste. The taste downside to the Atkins diet is that without bread, rice or pasta, there’s not much to sop up the juices and sauces of your meal. He’s another daily read of mine.

Operating system humour. Chris Cummer at ob.blog found this on Slashdot:

Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?

Apple: Where do you want to go tomorrow?

Linux: Are you guys coming or what?

Although Guile and I disgree about Freddy vs. Jason, (I hated it, he thought it was Citzen Kane), he’s come up with some good advice for those of you who have yet to see Return of the King. When Guile isn’t involved in kinky creamed-corn-wrestling with the lovely Chun Li, he writes some bang-on summaries of what’s been happening on Survivor: Pearl Islands.

Yes, I’ve met him, and as a matter of fact, he does glow in the dark. When Gamma Fodder isn’t studying noo-cue-lar physics, he’s hanging around my neck of Accordion City and writing some pretty funny stuff. In one of those “it’s a small world” coincidences, he’s a friend of Rob “King Floyd” MacDougall, with whom I wrote for the humour paper Golden Words at Crazy Go Nuts University. Rob’s Canadian, but he lives somewhere in the Boston area, like this cute girl I know.

(Look, it’s my blog, and I can get all Redhead-sappy if I want to.)

Like Gamma Fodder, Relapsed Catholic is not afraid to handle hot material. We agree to disagree much of the time, especially in areas where immigrants are concerned — I’m an immigrant, and sometimes she’s of the “Ever since my family came to Canada, we’ve had nothing but crap from immigrants!” school. I have to admit that we sometimes agree, and that her Don Cherry-meets-Don Rickles approach to religion, politics and pop culture is fascinating. Agree or disagree, she always makes for an engaging read.

Kathy recently wrote a poem poking fun at Kwanzaa, which has been described as a phony holiday created by a criminal by her and Jewish World Review (Tony Pierce, who’s black and left-leaning, also thinks of Kwanzaa as fake or at least fake-ish).

And then it hit the AOL fan. If freedom-of-speech and racism issues are your cup of political tea, you should take a peek.

My own feeling is that although Kwanzaa’s roots are pretty dubious, but I’m still looking for a non-drooling-right source to corroborate the evidence gathered against it. However, there is a precedent for the meaning of holidays to be supplanted — take Christmas being moved to knock out Saturnalia (and alas, maybe Spendmas knocking out Christmas) — and instilling more of a “Yes, we’re black and we should be proud” spirit, while realizing all the while that what holds us together as humans far outshines the differences. You know, like that little dream of Dr. King’s.

Of course, that may be a long time coming.

Boss Ross, thinks that the boss of a certain special lady friend of mine misses the point about public participation in ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the people who oversee the assignment of domain names (such as drinkyourownpee.com) and numbers (which all those nice domain names translate to). If the minutae of internet governance isn’t your cup of tea, there’s Ross’ entry on his quitting smoking, a must-read if you’re trying to quit the vile weed.

Elliot Noss, He Who Reigns Above Us All at Tucows also has a blog, and if internet governance is your bag, you should read his article on the recent WSIS meeting in Geneva.

My former coworker at OpenCola, Gary Lawrence Murphy, is a programmer, musician and expert observational chronicler. He writes about an anti-RIAA guerilla stickering campaign — one that I believe BoingBoing (co-edited by Canadian expat Cory Doctorow) hasn’t yet blogged it — that’s pretty cool.

Politics always makes for strong emotions and strong statements, and Deenster (who also worked with me at OpenCola) has a posting about her own experience with anger in the Israel/Palestine debate in her charming blog, Pony.

My one-stop checkpoint for things about the internet and juggling information is Circadian Shift. Jen Vetterli is a tireless aggregator of this sort of information, and as someone who works in the research and innovation wing of a company that helps make the Internet go, I find it incredibly useful.

Tony Gill,who runs Gill Advisors and has a business blog, in thinking about the parallels between the internet and coffee houses and the proposed replacement for the World Trade Center, writes:

Today, as in years gone by, freedom is not in the tallest structures in the world, but in small coffee shops on street corners where people gather to exchange information and ideas, to read a newspaper or magazine, or to connect to the Internet with laptop computers or wireless handheld devices to check their email and, perhaps, post notes to their websites on a Saturday morning.

Abnu is a Canadian working for an American company in Toronto (the most roundabout description since the tag line for the movie Victor Victroria). Naming and branding is his line of work, so he’s got something to say about the naming of “Operation Red Dawn”, in which one Saddam Hussein Al-Tikrit was captured.

Never mind “A Boy Named Sue”, here’s a girl named Bill! Bill’s one of the YULBloggers (a Montreal blogging social group) I met this September, and her blog, Geekward Ho is one of my regular reads. Her blog currently has a number of good Christmas jokes and some observations about what she learned over a three-day period.

My favourite right-wing canuck, Colby Cosh, wrote the best summary of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ever:

Hey, have you guys heard about this Return of the King movie? It’s pretty darn good! It’s about these Irish midgets who save the world! You should check it out!