(This was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)
Over at the Tucows Developer Blog, I have yet another installment in my series of articles on developing Facebook Applications using their PHP 5 client library. In this article, I look at the FacebookRestClient class’ groups_getMembers method.
Right now, my favourite T-shirt design over at Busted Tees is “Canada: America’s Hat”…
Click the photo to see the web page for the shirt.
(This was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)
I’ve known Bill Sweetman since the mid-nineties, back when I worked at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, so I was very pleased to find out that Tucows — the company where I hold the title of Technical Evangelist — has hired him as General Manager of our domain name portfolio.
Bill writes:
I’m going to be leading the charge to further monetize that portfolio as well as develop new products and services related to the portfolio. Translation: I’m going to be performing Domain Name Karate as a full-time job!
When presented with the opportunity to turn my long-held passion for domain names into a full-time gig, I leaped at the chance. This was truly one of those ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunities’ and I knew I’d regret turning it down. Plus, I get to work again with Ken Schafer and a great team of people who are equally passionate about the domain name space.
It’s good to have you on the team, Bill. Welcome to the herd!
While hanging out on Queen Street West back in the summer of 1985, I saw a T-shirt with the image below and bought it immediately. I wore it all summer that year:
Click the image to see the source.
Yesterday’s entry, “Thank You, Mask Man!”, got me thinking about that time and what was then my favourite t-shirt. A little Googling led to me to this entry in the blog We Saw a Chicken, whose author had scanned the image from the magazine Strange Things are Happening.
I’m going to invert the image and make it the desktop background on my computers.
Way, way back — I’m talking about twenty years ago — my friend Yann and I decided to go catch one of Reg Hartt’s Sex and Violence Cartoon Festival shows. For those of you who aren’t from around Accordion City, Reg is one of the city’s better-known eccentrics — he’s a film and cartoon buff who likes to show his collection of rare films. If you walk around some of the city’s hipper streets, you’re likely to see a poster for one of his screenings.
Yann and I had decided that after years of seeing these posters plastered all over town, we should actually attend one of these events. Reg now hosts his film screenings at his house, but back in the late eighties, he held his movie nights at the Cabana Room, which was the upstairs bar of the Spadina Hotel, which was located at the corner of King and Spadina. Today, that corner is both a nightclub and dining destination as well as home to a number of fancy offices and condos, and the Spadina Hotel has since closed and turned into a backpacker’s hostel. The corner is a yuppie haven now, but back then, it was considerably more seedy.
That upstairs bar was the sort of place you’d expect to see Charles Bukowski challenging Mickey Rourke, Harry Dean Stanton and Tom Waits to a shooter-drinking contest. It was delightfully divey, and populated with an assortment of interesting characters, from hard-drinkin’ old men to the not-quite-legal-to-drink (the legal age here being 19) spiky-haired punk and alternative rock crowd who’d spilled over from Queen Street, which was then a little edgier than it is today. The place looked like it hadn’t changed since the early 1960s. My favourite creature comforts there were the air conditioning — possibly the best in town, next to the bone-chiller at Sneaky Dee’s, then located in The Annex — and the Jiffy-Pop cooker on the bar, which was a hot plate rigged with Jiffy-Pop branding and a mechanical arm that shook the Jiffy-Pop package side-to-side as it cooked.
The Sex and Violence Cartoon Festival featured all sorts of old cartoons dating from the 1940s through the 1970s that you could no longer show in most places for their racy (and sometimes racist) content. One of Yann’s and my favourites was Thank You Mask Man, a cartoon based on a routine by Lenny Bruce, in which Lenny himself does the voices. It’s about what happens when the Lone Ranger decides to accept the thanks of the townspeople he saves, with hilarious — and very profane (especially considering the time) — results.
Thanks to this entry on MetaFilter, I know that someone put Thank You Mask Man on YouTube. Watching it makes me feel like I’m drunk and 19 again. Watch and enjoy, but be forewarned that this is a Lenny Bruce routine:
Original photo provided by Miss Fipi Lele.
Over at the Tucows Developer Blog, I have another installment in my series of articles on developing Facebook Apps in PHP: Using the FacebookRestClient Class’ “Group” Methods, Part 1.