Month: April 2006

Categories
Geek Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Upcoming Geek Events in Accordion City

Lots of things are happening in Accordion City’s high-tech scene over the next month:

DemoCamp 5.0: Tuesday, April 25th

Small DemoCamp logo DemoCamp is Toronto’s monthly gathering in which people from the high-tech community demonstrate their projects in front of their peers. You’ve got ten minutes and a “no PowerPoint, just demo” rule to make your presentation, after which anyone in the gathering can ask questions and make comments. This is a popular event — 140 people attended the last one.

This month’s DemoCamp takes place at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology (on the University of Toronto campus) on Tuesday, April 25th from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., followed by a gathering for dinner and drinks at a nearby pub. For more information, visit the wiki.

Toronto Ruby User Group Hackathon: Saturday, May 6th

TRUGdor the Rubynator TRUG — the Toronto Ruby User Group — is doing its part to improve the Ruby library and Tucows is glad to host the hackathon where they’ll be doing it. This hackathon’s goal is to implement the functionality of libarchive and libtar as both a pure-Ruby versions and as Ruby/C bindings to the libarchive and libtar libraries.

The Hackathon will take place on Saturday, May 6th, from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Tucows offices. Ruby local hero Austin Ziegler will provide the pizza. Sign up on the wiki!

Drupal Camp: Friday, May 12th

Drupal Camp’s goals are to:

  • Introduce new programmers/developers and consultant to the Drupal platform
  • Allow for intensive skill sharing among established developers/consultants
  • Give back to the Drupal project with a sprint to fix bugs and improve documentation

For more information, consult the wiki page.

Toronto BarCamp 2.0: Saturday, May 13th and Sunday, May 14th

Small BarCamp logo First, there was the invitation-only Foo Camp started by O’Reilly and Associates. BarCamp was created in response (“foo” and “bar” are often used as example names of programming constructs). The first Toronto BarCamp took place in November 2005, and the next one happens next month.

BarCamp can be described as:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

All attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one. All presentions are scheduled the day they happen.

BarCamp takes place on Saturday May 13th and Sunday, 14th in the Liberty Village area of Toronto. See the wiki for more details.

Mesh Conference: Monday, May 15th and Tuesday, May 16th

Mesh conference logo From the conference site:

You will hear from thought leaders, connect with peers, and get a better understanding of the impact of new developments online. mesh brings together people who are passionate about the potential of the Web to change how we live, work and play. Meet the next generation of Web ideas, leaders and companies at mesh.

The Mesh Conference — of which Tucows is a “supporting sponsor” — takes place on Monday, May 15th and Tuesday, May 16th at the MaRS Centre. For more information, visit their site.

Categories
Geek It Happened to Me

Drink Your Own Pee Dot Com [Updated]

The marketing team here at Tucows has informed me that domain names are increasing in value. People are forking outbig money for them again. I hear that domain names ending with the word “world” — for example, “pantsworld.com”, “steakworld.com”, “accordionworld.com” — are highly prized.

(If you’d like to know more interesting facts about domain names, Dennis Forbes has written an excellent article on what’s taken and what’s still available.)

I have decided that I have not exercised my domain name registration powers enough. No more!

I have claimed that the Internet would be “over” — not “over” in the non-functional sense, but “over” as in the way acid-wash jeans are — when the domain name drinkyourownpee.com was registered. I have decided that I must destroy the internet in order to save it and decided to register it myself. It’s mine now. Mine! Drink Your Own Pee Dot Com! Whoo-hoo!

(Ahem.)

And now comes the experiment. I’m going to see if I can turn it into a money-maker. There are all sorts of strategies I can try; I’m going to take some for a test spin and see which ones work. If drinkyourownpee.com makes me enough money to take The Missus out to dinner once a month, I’ll consider it a success. I’ll keep you informed of my progress.

(Suggestions are welcome — just leave them in the comments!)

The “It Should Be Obvious, But Just In Case It Isn’t” Disclaimer

I do not, I repeat, do not drink my own pee.

Update: Or anyone else’s pee, you wiseguys.

Categories
Uncategorized

A Student Government Suck-Fit

No matter which university or college you attend, student governments are preety much the same. They’re comprised largely of proto-wonks looking to have a taste of power, pad their resumes, have their own offices (and office sex) for the first time, make a few thousand bucks while doing so and most importantly, validate their own inflated senses of self-importance.

One of the finest examples of this is Ryan Holt, Vice President of the student government at the University of South Carolina, who is now immortalized in this video of him freaking out because someone had played a prank on him — they filled his office will balloons. “Look at me being serious!” he yelled, not realizing that his rant would be turned into a domain name, lookatmebeingserious.com.

Categories
It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Last Night’s Rails Pub Night

Another sign of Accordion City’s evolution into the next big high-tech centre: the turnout at last night’s Rails Pub Night, a monthly gathering of developers who use Ruby on Rails. From my count, we had 39 people at peak, not to mention 14 squishy cows and one accordion. There was the usual tech banter, but the conversation strayed into all sorts of non-tech areas and The Rhino (the pub where the event took place) was kind enough to let me get away with playing a couple of accordion numbers.

My favourite moment of the night: when I pulled out the accordion and Austin Zielger shouted: “Wait — you’re that Joey deVilla!”

I shot only a couple of photos, and here they are:

The room at peak. Lots of chatter and milling about.


Left to right: Sasha, Samir, Martin and Leigh grab a bite to eat.


Local Nerd Supermodels: yours truly and David Crow. We can’t let David “Pretty Boy” Hansson hog all the glamour shots, can we?


The Brain Trust Shot. Pete Forde (who got Rails Pub Night started) and David Crow (who got Accordion City’s BarCamp and DemoCamp started).

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

"Active 18 Association" Meeting Tonight

If you live in Accordion City’s Ward 18 (I work in the area, but live in High Park), you might be interested in tonight’s Active 18 Association meeting taking place at The Great Hall at Queen and Dovercourt. There’s a lot of hubbub about the developers building in the Queen West Triangle and if you’d like to have your say in what happens to this up-and-coming neighbourhood, this is you chance. For more details, see the Active 18 Association site.

Categories
In the News

"And Suddenly I Heard a Big Boom"

For most of us here in North America, Israel’s one of those places that we often talk about but haven’t visited. Even among Wendy’s and my immediate families — remember, her family’s Jewish — I believe only my Dad has been there. He went there as a young man in the early 1960s and probably saw a different country than it is today, both newly-formed and ancient at the same time. It was well before the Six-Day War, Golda Meir, Munich, Entebbe, Begin and Sadat, Lebanon, the Intifadahs, Gulf Wars and suicide bombings.

[To the left is a snapshot of channel 2 in Tel Aviv; Lisa’s the second person from the left.] I am probably quite unqualified to talk about the socio-politico-complexo-migraino issues surrounding Israel, but my friend Lisa Goldman is. She’s my friend Deenster’s older sister and is a journalist living in Tel Aviv. When I want a view of what’s going on in Israel and the West Bank that I’m not going to find in the news or the foaming-at-the-mouth pundits on either side of the Israel/Palestine debate, I go to her blog, On the Face.

Lisa’ latest entry covers Monday’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. She was about a fifteen-minute walk away when it happened, and she’s got words and pictures covering the aftermath. I’m glad to see she’s unharmed.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Happy Belated Easter!

Following up a couple of Passover dinners at friends’ places, Wendy celebrated her first Easter yesterday. She seems seems to have enjoyed it. As she wrote, it was a medium-sized gathering for my family: me, Wendy, my sister and brother-in-law, their three kids, mom, two aunts, an uncle, a cousin and her son. Nothing too large…at least by Filipino standards.

Dinner was great: Filipino-style ham cooked by a friend of the family, pancit (noodles), fresh lumpia (spring rolls), bangus relleno (stuffed milkfish), potato salad, a Middle Eastern parsely salad given to my mom by one of her patients, potato-scallion bread from Absolutely Fine Foods, and of course, rice. Dessert was a fruit-topped cake and Smarties-and-vanilla ice cream and blueberry frozen yogurt that Wendy and I made.

Since I posted a day-late comic for Passover featuring a robot, I thought I’d do the same for Easter. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dalek Catholic Mass: