Click the photo to see Doc’s original posting.
Categories
Month: December 2005
Categories
Daily Voting Reminder
Don’t worry, I’m going to be urging you to vote in the more important
Canadian federal election taking place on January 23rd, 2006.
However, in the meantime, I encourage you to vote for Accordion Guy in Round Two of the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards under the category “Best Blog”. Voting runs from now until the end of Friday.
Here’s an enticement: a slideshow of my 2003 hot tub party, and the promise of an untold tale from that bash tomorrow. Do we have a deal?
I’m giving Michael Kalus, a regular reader and commenter on this blog, a hand.
If you’re looking for a Solutions Architect who’s worked as:
- An architect at Telus for Accenture where he was:
- Lead architect for the IT Governance Center
- Lean architect for the Borland CaliberRM
- Application architect for the iWay Server
- Architect for SMIS
- Solutions architect / Capacity planner for Rogers Shared Services (now Rogers Shared Operations)
- Solutions architect / Senior Unix engineer for Research in Motion
- Senior Unix architect / Systems engineer for Bell ExpressVu
- Infrastructure architect / Systems engineer for Opensoft
…then he just might fit the bill! If you’re hiring and the list above has piqued your interest, here’s his resume [74K, Word document].
Categories
16 Years Ago
16 years ago, when I was a 22-year-old student at Queen’s University studying electrical engineering (computer option), Marc Lepine (nee Gamil Gharbi) entered the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and killed 14 women.
In these times, it’s tempting to argue about gender, politics and
philosophy — and hey, we probably should — but I’m going to leave
that for another day. I’d rather take a quiet moment to remember them
as women, as fellow engineering students and as human beings whose
lives were cut short.
Other perspectives:
For day 6 of the Accordion Guy Advent Calendar, how about something a little more Christmas-related? Here’s The Joys of Christmas [5.1MB, MP3], an essay written and narrated by British musician, DJ on BBC’s excellent 6 Music radio station and all-round cool guy Tom Robinson. Tom’s show is The Evening Sequence
and runs from 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 pm UK time (2:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time). The music selection is quite good and he often
has great interviews and presentations to boot.
(Those of you around my age may remember Tom’s songs: Power in the Darkness, 2-4-6-8 Motorway, War Baby and Atmospherics. Accordion City residents may remember Atmospherics as Listen to the Radio, which was also covered by odd-but-good band The Pukka Orchestra.)
One of the nice things about being given free rein to write tutorials
for Tucows services is that I can create my own graphics, like this one:
I use this graphic over at the Blogware blog where I demonstrate how to turn your plain jane text blog title into a beautiful graphic title. If you have a Blogware-based blog (such as one hosted at BlogHarbor or Blogzerk) and are looking to spruce up your blog, go read this article!
Welcome to Day Five of the Accordion Guy Advent Calendar. Today’s goodie: comics!
First, let’s take a look at a recent comic by Ted Rall. If you’re not familiar with Martin Niemoller’s poem, you’re going to miss the not-so-subtle reference…
Now while I think that some of the actions of the current U.S.
administration are intended to have chilling effects and are
curtailments on the freedoms for which they’ve been a role model, it
hasn’t and probably will not come to this. It exists only as a paranoid
fantasy in the minds of those the extreme left and as a wet dream in
the extreme right-wing blogsphere (Adam Yoshida, I’m lookin’ at you).
Even less probable are the events depicted in the comic book Liberality for All, in which the gentlemen pictured below are action heroes:
Almost as implausible as making Michael Moore and Al Franken into comic book action heroes.
Uh…yeah.
The comic (literally) takes place in a different reality: one where
Al
Gore was acclaimed the winner of the 2000 election deadlock. Like a
gazillion “what if” speculative fiction stories in which one historical
detail is changed, the future was altered drastically. Let’s look at Sean Hannity, a year after 9/11:
What would have Gore done? Feel free to speculate in the comments.
That was all flashback. The comic actually takes place in the year
2021, 20 years after 9/11. The UN effectively runs the US (currently
ruled by President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore).
We jump to the UN in New York, where the “Honourable UN Representative
from Afghanistan” is being warmly greeted:
Don’t laugh. In the comic, I’m sure the NDP is running Canada.
The next panel, which I haven’t included, shows the UN ambassadors from
Canada, Germany, France and Spain — guilty parties in right-wing eyes
— applauding. Suckers! Osama’s goodwill gesture is a front: he’s actually planning to bring a nuke to New York City!
In the meantime, let’s get back to Hannity. In the year 2021, with conservatism outlawed, he’s part of the
underground, broadcasting his show via pirate radio and a key player in
the resistance. For reasons that I suspect are being saved for later,
he lost his right arm (presumably in a skirmish with left-wing pinko
fellow-travellers) and now has a bionic prosthesis. He also sports an
eyepatch in the style of Colonel Nick Fury from S.H.I.E.L.D.:
By “those who can’t”, he means “the pampered
upper-middle and upper class, tongue-tied folks that they are”. His
chamber is lit with red lightbulbs in memory of the red states.
Luckily for Hannity, he’s got help: G. Gordon Liddy, looking as spry as
he did when I last saw him during a visit to Crazy Go Nuts University
in the late eighties (for reasons unknown, he was often a guest
lecturer during Homecoming). Back then, he was so damned proud of his
involvement in the Nixon scandal that his car sported the licence plate
H20GATE. In the comic, he’s traded the car for a motorbike which he
drives with action-hero adeptness.
Even with at least three laser sights locked on his dome, Liddy can observe a moment of silence for his dead homies.
Hey, what’s a right-wing action hero comic without a little dig at gun control? Or, for that matter, France?
The real G. Gordon Liddy would never touch a French gun!
No matter where you live in the political spectrum (see this map of where I live in Politopia, according to their quiz), I’m sure you’ll find this comic, Liberality for All, entertaining reading.
If you didn’t like the comic — or at least not in the way its creators
probably intended — hey, good for you. You are probably free of head
injury.