Month: March 2009

Accordion City’s other name, Toronto, is a native word for “meeting place”. Chicago is supposed to mean “stink onion”, in reference to the marshland onions that grew there well before the “El” and Wrigley Field. The Atlas of True Names presents the world with its place names translated into their meaning, turning the Sahara into the Sea of Sand, Paris into the City of Boatmen, Hong Kong into Fragrant Harbour, Grozny into “The Awesome” and Great Britain into Great Land of the Tattooed.

I’ve posted a collage of maps from the Atlas of True Names below. Click on them to see them at full size:

The best way to come out of a freak accident is freak survival. Cem Tokac of Turkey was struck by a truck that was crossing a railway track while a train was closing in. The train struck the truck, which was then push right into Tocak, who was standing by the tracks. He fell between the wheels of the truck, which is how he didn’t get pulverized.

There are a few more details and a video in this article.

Today, Friday, March 6th, marks yet another day for Coffee and Code. It’s also a milestone: for the first time, there’s more than one Coffee and Code event!

The Southern California Coffee and Code takes place today at the Starbucks in Tustin Marketplace (2959 El Camino Real, just off the I5 and Jamboree). It’s hosted by Denny “mrdenny” Cherry, a Microsoft MVP, SQL Server guy and Senior Database Admin and Architect at Awareness Technologies.

Meanwhile, across the continent, the Toronto Coffee and Code will also take place today from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at The Roastery in the 401 Richmond Building:

As you might expect, the Toronto Coffee and Code will be hosted by Yours Truly. Hope to see you there!

If Superman were a real American, he’d have proposed super-tax cuts, not super-welfare:

This is one of those posts that I’d normally relegate to the tech blogs for which I write – Global Nerdy and Canadian Developer Connection – but I thought that it might be of interest to a non-techie audience. I hope you like it!

One of the things we saw at the behind-closed-doors, Microsoft-eyes-only TechReady 8 conference was the “2019” concept video shown to us by Business Division President Stephen Elop. Since then, the video’s gone public, with his showing it recently at the Wharton Business Technology Conference and its appearance on Long Zheng;s blog, I Started Something.

The video is a montage of “slices of life” in the year 2019, and shows a vision for how people could be using technology in their everyday life then. Don’t think of this video as an attempt to predict the future; they’re notorious for being hilariously wrong in retrospect. Instead, think of it as inspiration for future projects, a source of ideas for applications and user interfaces and a way to shake loose any assumptions or fixations you might have about how applications should work. As developers, I thought that you might find the video (it’s 5 minutes, 38 seconds in length) an interesting watch, and possibly even the spark that gets you started on your next project.

For those of you who are the type to analyze still frames from your favourite movies, you can see some close-ups of the future user interfaces featured in the video in the PowerPoint deck that Stephen Elop used when he showed this video.

Here’s a great comic by Kate Beaton. Click on it to see it on its original page: