Courtesy of one Miss Fipi Lele, I’ve got my paws on a memo sent by Matt Stone, one of the creators of South Park, which is concerned about getting the final cut for the movie Bigger, Longer and Uncut approved by the Motion Picture Association of America. South Park being what it is, that’s no easy task.
A snippet of the memo is shown below. Click it to read the full memo. Warning: Swear words and much distastefulness abounds!.
By the bye, the final line of the memo makes it perfect.
Here comes another job-related entry (hence the cheesecake in the previous one). I’m not above “buying” my readers.
First, let me give you a couple of snippets from the press release:
TORONTO, CANADA (June 15, 2006) – Tucows Inc. (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Mailbank.com Inc. (doing business as NetIdentity), a privately held, profitable business owning and managing a domain name portfolio that Tucows believes is one of the Internet’s largest collections of surname addresses.
This acquisition will allow Tucows to offer personalized Internet services through its channel of over 6,000 Internet access and hosting providers. The portfolio includes thousands of the most common surnames (such as smith.net) and will be used to enhance Tucows’ email, web publishing and domain services. For example, Tucows’ channel partners will be able to offer their customers personalized email addresses such as allie@schiffler.com or blog and web addresses like www.dirk.landstrom.com.
According to NetIdentity, their portfolio of domain names covers around 60 to 70 percent of the surnames in North America. As Samuel L. Jackson would put it:
In addition to the press release, there’s also a FAQ which explains the deal quite clearly. (You’ll have to click an “I understand the terms and conditions” button.)
Even better than the FAQ is the podcast (you’ll have to click an “I understand the terms and conditions” button) which features an interview with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss and an interviewer who’ll go far on that velvety-smooth voice of his.
(The podcast is 17MB in size and runs 24 minutes, 43 seconds in length.)
Note what the two women in the photo below brought as beach reading material:
If this is Photoshoppery, the artist has done a very good job on not one, but three photos. This one is the safe-for-work pic (here’s the Flickr page on which it appears). There are two topless, not-safe-for-work ones here and here.
Perhaps it’s fake, but for the sake of computer science in general, I want to believe!
Last Tuesday, I was invited with a few other select Accordion City bloggers to take a special advance tour of the Four Seasons Centre, the new home of the Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet of Canada. I’m still working on writing up my impressions of the place, but that shouldn’t keep you from seeing my pictures. I’ve taken my photos and put them in an album, which you can view either as a photo album or as a slideshow.
Here are some smaller versions of the photos I took; click any of them to start the slideshow.
It’s a sure sign that this blog has made the big time: I just got my first legal “nastygram” — a “cease and desist” letter from the hamburger chain Wendy’s International, Inc. Here’s a photo of the letter, delivered to me via FedEx’s “Urgent” sevrice:
And here’s the text of the letter:
Dr. Mr. deVilla:
It has come to the attention of Wendy’s International, Inc. that you have been infringing upon Wendy’s International’s intellectual property rights through your unauthorized and unlawful use of video clips of Wendy’s training video “Grill Skill” on your website www.accordionguy.blogware.com. This is a copyrighted work of Wendy’s International, Inc. It may be reproduced only with the express written consent of Wendy’s International, Inc.
You must immediately cease and desist from any further unauthorized use of Wendy’s training video “Grill Skill”. Should you fail to cease your use of the marks and video clip of the training video, we will be forced to take any and all legal actions available.
In addition, you must provide me with information regarding the source and manner in which you acquired Wendy’s training video “Grill Skill”.
I trust that you appreciate the seriousness of this matter. Please give this matter your immediate attention and notify me as to your intentions.
The video in question features burger cooking instructions done in the form of a circa-1985 funk music video, which makes sense give the average age of a fast food line staffer and MTV back in those days, when they actually played music videos. It may seem silly, but it’s effective: I haven’t watched it since last year, and I can probably still tell you the Wendy’s-mandated proper time to flip a burger and what a “four-corner press” is.
Far be it from me to upset my favourite large hamburger chain. As far as I know, Wendy’s still doesn’t cook their burgers from frozen patties, but locates their franchises close to supplies of fresh beef. They make a far better chicken sandwich than McDonald’s or Burger King, and I applaud their contribution to materials science in the form of their “soquid” research. I cheered during founder Dave Thomas’ cameo in the made-for-TV movie Bionic Ever After, in which he and Colonel Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man himself, exchange a couple of lines in the middle of a hostage situation.
So although the video was posted without malice towards Wendy’s International Inc and I never made a dime from having it on this blog, I have better things to do than to deal with a legal department on the warpath. I have removed the video from the blog entry, thus ending what must have been described in the Wendy’s offices as “the year of terror”.
As far as telling them where I found the video, the best I can do is “I found it somewhere on the internet”. I found it on some website while surfing randomnly last year, and damned if I can remember which one it was.
I intend to send them a note letting them know that I’ve removed the video, and I intend to brighten the day of some junior lawyer at Wendy’s corporate counsel by having some fun in that note, which is where you can help. What do you think I should write? Let me know in the comments!
Click the image below to see why they don’t run Windows on the U.S.S. Enterprise [1.6 MB animated .gif]:
That’s right, we’re hiring! Among the positions that we have open are some junior developer positions. Here’s the brief run-down:
Salary range: Commensurate with experience.
Main purpose: Join a team of developers to develop new and maintain/support existing applications written primarily in Java but also in Perl. Additional project and duties may be assigned as required. Carrying a pager and on-call support duties may be required.
Skills and qualifications:
- B.A. or B.Sc. degree
- 1 to 3 years of programming experience in production application development
- Hands on experience with Java programming and Unix/Linux
- Experience with relational databases and SQL (preferably Oracle)
- Some familiarity with production environments
- Excellent problem solving skills
- Good understanding of OO techniques
- Some experience with Perl, HTML, XML and shell scripting
- Version control system experience (preferably CVS)
- Understanding of the following protocols: SMTP, DNS, HTTP and TCP/IP
- Experience with J2EE
- Must work well with little supervision/quick learner
- Excellent time management skills to meet deadlines
- Attention to detail, ability to stay focused and work under pressure
- Demonstrated team player
- Demonstrates enthusiasm and is passionate about technology
- Ability to work with vaguely specified requests is important
As I said before, we’ve got other positions open too — check out the Tucows jobs page for details.